The Orrin W. Burritt Mansion
in Weedsport is a classic example of high-style residential architecture
in Victorian America, with a mix of international styles blended
to create a picturesque unity. Architectural styles in 19th century
America were used deliberately by architects and builders to create
images and associations in the minds of those who visited the house
or just passed by on the street. One of the key proponents of this
use of specific styles in domestic architecture was Andrew Jackson
Downing, a landscape architect, designer, and general arbiter of
taste in the 1840s and early 1850s. Downing published a number of
books in his short life, in an attempt to foster a sense of taste
and civility in the selection of architectural designs. His most
influential book was Cottage Residences, published in 1842 and updated
several times until Downing died in 1852. Though a generation removed
from Downing, the Burritt Mansion incorporates a number of the concepts
in Downing’s books.

The house essentially is a symmetrical two-story
rectangular block, with a central entrance on the north side that
faces Van Buren Street. This symmetry and simplicity of form, however,
is augmented by a profusion of architectural details and structures
to the point that the house appears asymmetrical. It has a hipped
roof, which allows for eaves on all sides of the house; these eaves
are opportunities for additional decorations. It is interesting
to note that the roof of the house is clad in raised-seam metal.
Orrin Burritt, in addition to owning a successful hardware store
in Weedsport, was an inventor with patents for two machines that
crimped and put seams in metal. While the current roof likely is
a modern replacement, it clearly suggests Burritt’s inventive
capacities.

The most important stylistic influence in
the Burritt Mansion is the Italianate, which was popular throughout
the northeast from the 1850s into the 1880s. Downing frequently
promoted the “Italian” style, “with its verandas
and balconies, its projecting roofs, and the capacity and variety
of its form.” He was particularly fond of the sentiments that
people at the time would associate with the Italianate style: “So,
too, an Italian villa may recall, to one familiar with Italy and
art, by its bold roof lines, its campanile and its shady balconies,
the classic beauty of that fair and smiling land, where pictures,
sculpted figures, vases, and urns, in all exquisite forms, make
part of the decorations and ‘surroundings’ of domestic
and public edifices.”

Even a quick glance at the Burritt Mansion
confirms its Italianate pedigree. The clearest feature is the overhanging
eaves on all sides of the house. The eaves are supported by a dense
and richly detailed mix of decoratively sawn curved brackets and
dentils, the small tooth-like blocks between the brackets.

In addition to the Italianate, the Queen
Anne style informs the Burritt Mansion. While this style arrived
on the American scene only in the 1870s, well after Downing, it
contributed to the sense of the picturesque that he favored. Drawing
loosely upon medieval English buildings, the Queen Anne style in
America included such features as turrets, wrap-around porches,
and projecting two-story window bays. When it was built in 1876,
the Burritt Mansion included a prominent turret rising from the
front roof above the central entrance bay. It is not clear when
this turret was removed.

Other Queen Anne features remain, however.
The first floor of the Burritt Mansion clearly is dominated by the
open porch that wraps around the façade and the west side
and that is canted at the northwest corner. In addition, the east,
north, and west sides of the house feature window bays in the Queen
Anne style.

Downing, however, was no stranger to the
use of architectural features that later were part of the Queen
Anne style. After singing the praises of verandas as necessary to
a comfortable house, he noted that “bay or oriel windows,
balconies, and terraces, added to villas, increase their interest,
not only by their beauty of form, but by their denoting more forcibly
those elegant enjoyments which belong to the habitation of man in
a cultivated and refined state of society.”

One of Downing’s key concepts was fitness:
a building should express its purpose clearly in its design and
design features. In Cottage Residences, he identified three crucial
features that conveyed an expression of purpose: “the chimneys,
the windows, and the porch, veranda, or piazza; and for this reason,
whenever it is desired to raise the character of a cottage or villa
above mediocrity, attention should first by bestowed on those portions
of the building.” When it was built, the Burritt Mansion emphasized
all three of these key design features, and most remain intact.
As noted above, the porch is crucial to the design of the Burritt
Mansion. The windows, moreover, served as opportunities for extravagant
design. The caps above the windows were designed in a mix of designs
and geometrical forms, including segmental arches, triangular pediments,
and straight horizontal cornices. Only the chimneys no longer contribute
to Downing’s sense of completeness, as they have been rebuilt
with standard bricks and straight sides. As seen in the historical
photographs, the tops of the chimneys originally were corbelled,
in which the bricks extend outward as they reach the top of the
chimney.

1.
General view of the house looking southeast, showing the porte-cochere
and verandah

This general
view of the house, looking to the southeast from Van Buren Street,
shows the angle from which it was supposed to be seen. Like portraits
of people, houses also have their best sides, and this view was
designed to be just that. All of the key elements of the house are
here, in a glorious profusion of details. While the front door to
the house faces Van Buren Street, which is on the left in this view,
the real entrance, the one that welcomes visitors, is at the northwest
corner of the wrap-around porch. The corner is canted, or cut at
an angle, with a richly decorated triangular pediment rising from
the eave of the porch identifying the stairs which lead to the verandah.
The canted corner of the porch continues on the second floor, where
a single window is looks out of the corner beneath a projecting
hipped-roof window cap, supported by decorative curved brackets
with ornate carving on the sides leading to a small drop pendant
in the center. This feature even continues above the second floor
to the roof, which is canted to match the first and second floors;
this segmental nature of the roof line gives an additional visual
emphasis to the richly detailed overhanging eaves, supported by
elaborate curved wooden brackets that indicate the Italianate style.
The west side of the house, which faces the camera in this view,
is now dominated by the porte-cochere, the open structure that gave
those who lived in the house and their guests protection from the
elements when stepping out of their carriages. The porte-cochere
was added in 1910, and shows its later construction with square
wooden posts resting on yellow brick piers, and the deeply recessed
triangular pediment facing Van Buren Street above Colonial Revival-inspired
tooth-like dentil moldings.

2.
A view of the staircase from the foyer showing the carved newell
post, the coffered panels beneath the second flight of stairs, and
a portion of the elaborate first floor ceiling.

The front door of the house opens to a small vestibule, lined with
coffered wood panels on the sides and ceiling. The vestibule in
turn opens to this formal foyer, with a central wood staircase as
the key visual element. The mix of design elements from various
architectural styles, so visible on the exterior, continues with
this staircase. The undersides of the staircase, seen here on the
right side of the photograph, are lined with coffered wood panels,
which is reminiscent of classical architecture and is the sort of
thing that would be expected in a house from the early 19th century
when classical revival styles were still in vogue. The same goes
for the niche in the wall at the first landing, containing the classical
sculpture. The other details visible in this photo, though, show
the Victorian love for ornamentation and for drawing from a variety
of design sources. The drop pendants that mark the turning points
on the staircase, for example, are drawn from English Baroque houses
of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the newel post with its squat
urn decoration and classically-inspired volutes above, and the carved
door surrounds (visible at the far left and far right of the photo),
are hallmarks of the Italianate style, which was popular in America
in the from the 1850s to the 1880s. The walls and the ceilings,
meanwhile, demonstrate the Victorian fear of unadorned surfaces,
with wallpapers in contrasting floral patterns and the ceiling clad
in various geometrical designs.

3.
This is a view of the rear of the porte-cochere, looking north from
the driveway toward Van Buren Street, along with the west side of
the house. It being the rear of the house, the porte-cochere’s
tympanum (the triangular area within the pediment above the columns)
is plain unlike the decorative floral motif in the tympanum on the
front of the porte-cochere. Everything else, though, is just as
ornate and decorative, with the elaborate brackets between the porte-cochere’s
pediment and the columns, the dentil moldings at the bottom of the
pediment, and the multi-layered cornice molding. The west side of
the house that is visible in this photograph also includes significant
architectural details. The porte-cochere, which was added in 1912,
leads to an enclosed breezeway that is in turn connected to an enclosed
porch and to the wrap-around front porch. Family could come directly
through the enclosed porch into the dining room, while guests could
make their way along the porch to the front door on the north side
of the house. The most prominent architectural feature on the west
side of the house, however, is the two story projecting bay. Enclosed
by the porch on the first floor, it is fully visible on the second
floor, capped by segmental arches.

4. This close view of the north
side of the house that faces Van Buren Street shows several key
design elements. The wrap-around porch is a vital part of the design
of the house, and was designed to be a sign of both comfort and
welcome. The relatively simple entablature above the columns leads
to highly ornate pediments with deeply recessed molding and a carved
floral decoration in the tympanum within the triangular pediment.
Things become even more interesting on the second floor, where the
canted corner provides a base for the extensively carved and highly
decorative curved brackets that support a hip roofed cap. The single
window adjacent to the corner on the front features a segmental
arch for a cap, supported by a complicated molding. This view of
the overhanging eaves, moreover, clearly shows the richness of architectural
detail with the grouped curved brackets of different sizes, interspersed
with smaller dentil moldings. Perhaps the greatest interest, however,
is created by the balcony that rises above the central front door.
With its slender columns with spiral turning, the gently pointed
arches, and the faceted dome above, it is drawn from Moorish sources.
Based loosely on Islamic architecture in both Turkey and in southern
Spain, this style was in vogue in America from the mid-19th century,
after the publication of Washington Irving’s travel book,
Tales of the Alhambra, into the early 20th century. More often used
on large-scale commercial buildings and movie theaters, it only
occasionally shows up in small-scale residential architecture, making
this element on the Burritt Mansion in Weedsport a rarity. Just
beyond the balcony, moreover, lies a two-story projecting window
bay, one of the hallmarks of the Queen Anne style of architecture.

5. The interior
of the house has a formal arrangement in which family areas are
clearly distinguished from public areas. Particularly after the
Civil War, families and the business world were designed not to
collide in Victorian America, as a protective measure for the family.
This view of the first floor of the Burritt Mansion, looking from
the east parlor into the west parlor, clearly shows this divide.
The central foyer, in the center of this photograph, is designated
as a public space, where guests would remain until allowed into
the family portions of the house, in the parlors. These twin parlors
are on either side of the foyer, and each can be closed by means
of the double pocket doors to create safe family spaces; both sets
of pocket doors continue to function as they were designed. The
focal point of each parlor is a fireplace with an elaborate carved
wooden surround. The fireplace in the west parlor, in the background
of this photograph, features square ceramic tiles surrounding the
firebox which contains a metal coal grate that appears to have been
produced using Burritt’s patented metal crimping machines.

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6. This view of the second floor
staircase landing reinforces the symmetry of the Burritt Mansion’s
internal arrangement. Wide arched door openings on either side of
the hallway lead to bedroom suites complete with closets and bathrooms.
The carved door surrounds, meanwhile, were executed in the Italianate
style, in keeping with many of them architectural details on the
exterior.

7. The Victorian love of ornamentation
is on full display in this view of the dining room. The ceiling
is nearly breathtaking in its complexity, with its intermingling
of geometrical and floral forms. An central oval, set within rectangular
patterns on the edges, features intricately patterned fabric. This
photograph was taken from the west parlor, where a double door leads
into the dining room. At the other end of the dining room, two doors
are set within Italianate style door frames with classical style
cornices on top; the single door on the left leads to a butler’s
pantry and the kitchen, while the double door leads to a small sitting
room. The dining room is on the west side of the house, with French
doors opening to the enclosed porch and the porte-cochere, and thus
receives abundant light.

8. This is a view of the east
side of the house, taken from the corner of Van Buren and Horton
Streets. The key element on this side of the house clearly is the
projecting three-sided bay, which was an important component in
the Queen Anne style of architecture. Unlike the projecting window
bay on the west side of the house above the porte-cochere, the side
walls on this bay extend from the wall of the house at less than
90 degrees, making for an asymmetrical-looking bay that was an important
component of the Queen Anne style of architecture. Two other features
are worthy of note in this view. First, take note of the windows,
particularly the window caps. Andrew Jackson Downing in the 19th
century placed great emphasis on the windows as expressing the purpose
of a house, and the architect of the Burritt Mansion used nearly
every type of window cap that was available with little regard to
consistency of arrangement. On the main walls, the first floor windows
are capped by a complex cornice supported by curved brackets, while
the second floor windows feature pedimented window caps rising above
complex corbelled moldings, meaning that each row of molding extends
further from the wall than the one below it. On the bay, meanwhile,
the first floor features the pedimented window caps while the second
floor windows are capped by segmental arches with carved sunburst
patterns within, supported by curved brackets. All of the windows
on the house, meanwhile are framed by fluted pilasters that add
an extra layer of richness to the visual appeal.

The second feature to note is
the gable that rises from the eaves above the projecting bay and
projects outward from the wall, drawing additional attention to
the bay. Here, the architect truly let his imagination run riot,
creating an extraordinarily richly textured architectural feature.
Groupings of heavily decorated curved brackets support the eaves
of the gable, while the gable structure itself is supported above
the chamfered edges of the bay by corbelled three-sided blocks.
The single window within the gable, meanwhile is protected on each
side by a projecting narrow curved bracket. The gable itself is
recessed, with a secondary pediment within. Written descriptions
of this bay and gable could carry on for pages; it certainly merits
a very close examination in the photograph.

9. This close view of the porte-cochere
on the west side of the house shows continues to show the contrasting
mix of various design styles. The severely geometrical pediment
above the porte-cochere, for example, is softened by the delicate
floral design in the tympanum, while the segmental arch at the top
of the projecting three-sided bay on the second floor contrasts
with the pedimented cap above the single window adjacent to the
bay. The projecting bay itself, meanwhile, is positively tame by
comparison to the three-sided bay on the west side of the house,
in the picture above. In contrast to the projecting bays on the
east and north sides of the house, the sides of this bay extend
from the wall of the house at 90-degree angles, forming a rectangular
plan. The top of the bay features a segmental arch facing outward
over the wide part of the bay, and portions of arches on the narrow
sides of the bay adjacent to the house. The gable that rises above
the bay on this side would be considered elaborate on nearly any
other house; by comparison to the gable on the east side of the
house, however, it shows remarkable restraint.